KYIV – VENICE: Armen Agop in dialogue with Tiberius Silvashi

Realm of Silence

https://www.labiennale.org/en/art/2026/egypt

Armen Agop guides the viewer through the Egyptian Pavilion by way of three rooms of silence, moving from the tangible to the invisible, where the weight of granite invites one to slow down and hear what is usually drowned out by the speed of the gaze. Tiberiy Szilvashi achieves a similar effect with oil pigment: layer by layer, he conceals other colours and textures beneath the visible surface – elements that cannot be seen, yet can be felt. In both cases, the density of matter becomes a spectacle in itself.

Different materials – stone and paint, the desert and the studio – lead to the same conclusion: the sacred is not revealed but cultivated through time. Agop suggests that silence is not the absence of meaning but a form of presence; Szilvashi expresses the same idea through painting, the body of which he describes as a “discourse of mystery.” Both artists propose the same departure from the speed of the world: slowing down as a way of perceiving what usually remains unnoticed.

https://artreview.com/armen-agop-on-representing-egypt-at-the-61st-venice-biennale/